Talleyrand: A Biographical Study. Joseph McCabe

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СКАЧАТЬ these spectacles. Talleyrand’s course was natural. He used the influence of the president, who had a strong liking for him, to enter the gayer group of prelates. Dillon and de Brienne opened a few more of the Parisian salons to him. In the course of the sittings he had been made “promoteur” (a kind of sub-secretary, usually given a fair gratuity at the close), and was appointed to an unimportant committee on the voting counters and a very important one on religion and jurisdiction. He claims that he won some distinction in this Assembly, and was already marked for the high position of Agent-General of the Clergy. In September (1775—or eighteen months after Mme. du Barry has quitted the scene) we find a notice in the Gazette that he has been appointed abbé commendataire of the abbey of St. Denis at Rheims, which brought him an income of 18,000 livres a year. The diplomatic career thus began. The Pope confirmed the election of the sub-deacon abbé, and the prior took possession in Talleyrand’s name in December. As Chamfort put it, the ecclesiastical bachelor naturally looked to a wedding with some rich abbey to pay his debts. Bishops, Pope, and King acquiesced in the system without a murmur. All the bishops had sinecures of the sort, and the Court contrived to keep a few vacant at times and pocket the revenues. Talleyrand had not voluntarily entered the ecclesiastical world, and he was determined to make it serve his own ideal as far as possible. But one of his first acts was to pay off the debt his parents still owed to the Collège d’Harcourt.

      Before going to Rheims he had applied for admission into the Society of the Sorbonne and been accepted (after formal proof of his moral and intellectual qualities). He took up residence there after the close of the Assembly. With his abbatial income (more than £700 a year) and the prospect of scraps of political and administrative work, he could have at once begun an independent residence in Paris. But that would have left him in the ambiguous position of a cleric and celibate, cut off from the higher clerical distinctions and possibilities. He must now complete his ecclesiastical education in the usual way, and proceed by way of the Agency-General (to come in 1780) to the episcopate.

      However, the Sorbonne had not an intimidating repute for austerity. The Abbé Morellet, who had lived there with Turgot and de Brienne, describes in his memoirs the condition of the Sorbonne, and the details of what we may call its “fellowships,” in the eighteenth century. Its library supplied him with Locke, Bayle, and Clarke, as well as with Bellarmine and Aquinas. He read Voltaire, and associated with Diderot and d’Alembert. Theological studies of the old type were pretty well out of fashion. His companions were very generally imbued with the ideas of the philosophers. This relaxation of the older discipline continued down to the Revolution, and Talleyrand did not find residence there irksome. He stayed there two years, wrote the customary theses, and took a licentiate in theology on March 2nd, 1778. He never tried for the doctorate. But we may well believe that, as he says, he was “taken up with quite other things than theology.” The success of 1775 had stimulated him, and he spent many an hour in the darkened chapel before the tomb of Richelieu. He hints, too, that pleasure was his chief preoccupation, though this is limited by a later statement that he was unable to look up young Choiseul and find secular friends until he had left the Sorbonne. About the beginning of 1778 he completed his theological training and plunged in the gaieties of Parisian life.8

So much has been written on the social life of the wealthy and noble classes in France on the eve of the Revolution, that I need say little more than that the Abbé de Périgord, as he was now commonly styled, was found in every brilliant salon and circle at Paris during the next ten years. “You do not know what it is to live,” he would say indulgently to the new generation in their restored gaiety after 1815. In some few respects the pace of life had been moderated since the days of Louis XIV, but in others it had increased. There were no longer Pompadours and Du Barrys at Versailles, but the King’s propriety was less noticeable than his vulgarity9—courtiers telling daily of his prodigious breakfasts and dinners and indigestions, his antics when they were putting him to bed, and so on—and was quite undone by his weakness. The cynical memoirs of Lauzun show how little change there was in the character of the Court. The imprudence and frivolity of the beautiful young Queen, leaving Versailles to mix with the masked crowd at the Opera when the King had gone to bed (and being locked out by her tactless consort at six in the morning), or gambling heavily with her ladies until day-break, or giving far too substantial ground for charges of gallantry, encouraged the rising generation of nobles in their giddy dance in the crater of a rumbling volcano. She was largely responsible for the passion for heavy gambling that broke out. At Marly her ladies had to change their dresses after playing—soiled with the masses of gold wrung from an almost bankrupt country. A vulgar American adventurer could get the entrée of Versailles by letting it be known that he had a large sum of money to lose; he won in a short time 1,500,000 livres from his royal shearers. Another man won 1,800,000 livres in one evening. The thoughtless Count d’Artois, the King’s brother, bet the Queen 100,000 livres that he would build a palace in the Bois in six weeks; he won it—and the 900 men he had employed scattered over Paris with the story. Whoever could invent or import a new sensation was sure of the Queen’s support. Racing was introduced from England, and she flew to Sablons to lay bets on the horses of her favourite, the too notorious Lauzun. Then chariot races (some chariots costing ten thousand crowns) varied the programme; and a society was formed at Paris for the construction of a bull-ring. Grave parliamentary lawyers and financial ministers frowned, and were dismissed.

      From an engraving.

      TALLEYRAND

       (A portrait taken in early life).

      In dress, furniture and banquets the fashion was equally luxurious and criminal. The age of Henri Quatre took the fancy of the younger nobles, and they tried to revive the splendid costumes of that time, but the King interfered. Whole fortunes were spent on fantastic head-dresses. Ladies drove among the impoverished people and before bankrupt tradesmen with structures two or three feet high on their heads, landscapes, symbolic designs—the American Independence hat, the racing hat, the vaccination hat, and so on. Orders of chivalry were set up by this nobility that was squeezing the blood out of the veins of the peasantry. There was an Order of Perseverance, with statutes by Mme. de Genlis, meetings in a gorgeous tent in Lauzun’s garden, and costumes of white and grey and silver; in this edifying company the initiate had to answer a riddle, reply to a “moral question,” make a speech in eulogy of some virtue, and—vow to redress injustice and succour the poor and distressed! Clotho and Lachesis must have smiled for once. There were rival Orders of Patience and Felicity and what not. Then Anglo-mania crept into their idle brains, and long evenings were spent in discussing the excellence of popular representation over tea and bread and butter, and the geometrical gardens were Anglicised at great expense, and Gobelins tapestry gave place to wall-paper. And, in fine, we get a real novelty in the shape of Cagliostro with his toad that had received all the Sacraments, his innocent young girl, and his devils at command. Cardinal-Prince de Rohan, with the two-and-a-half millions a year and heavy debts, with the alb worth 100,000 livres, with the twenty-five valets de chambre and fourteen maitres d’hotel, had set him up in his palace at Paris; and dashing colonels and elderly countesses and philosophic abbés went to see Beelzebub in the flesh. And the Fourth Estate was coming rapidly to birth.

      Into this giddy stream the Abbé de Périgord gladly plunged. He was in his twenty-fourth year, still pale of face, but with the familiar Talleyrand features fully developed: the quiet blue-grey eyes, so very observant, under bushy eye-brows, the nose pointed and slightly turned up, the lower lip protruding a little, a faint smile hovering about the mouth, and a fine crop of long, wavy hair framing the attractive face. He had taken a small house in the district of Bellechasse (near the Invalides), collected an excellent library of good books in good bindings, and at once renewed his acquaintance with Choiseul, Count Louis de Narbonne, and the Abbé de Périgord. They were collective owners of a stable of racers, and were the nucleus of a group of diners and talkers that nearly every ambitious woman must entertain. Talleyrand soon completed his education. He became a famous whist-player (his chief amusement through life), and added a good deal to his income at the tables.

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